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Month February 2017

Last June the good people of Sacramento rose up to defend their community against a white supremacist rally at the state capitol. They were able to run the bigots off, but not without casualties on our side. The bad news, however, is that the neo-nazis weren’t above stabbing people en masse and sent nine antifascists to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

If this sounds familiar, it could be because we already donated money to help our injured friends back in July. So why are we bringing this up again? It’s because one of our friends was hurt far badly than the other eight and as a result, had a longer stay in hospital, more medical interventions done to save their life, and as a result of all of that, has incurred much higher medical expenses than originally anticipated.

This is why we made another donation more recently to help pay for those medical expenses. No one who literally puts their life on the line to shut down neo-nazis should be left on the hook for subsequent medical expenses.

What do you do if you’re a high school teacher that has offered a letter of recommendation to one of your students for his college applications, only to find out later that he’s been brandishing swastikas and racially-abusing his classmates?

For U.S. high school teacher Hillary, she had to rescind her recommendation upon learning this. Which any reasonable person would see makes complete sense. If a student’s behavior and judgement is that faulty, it would be wrong to continue to endorse them as a good candidate for other schools.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished and because she rescinded her letter of recommendation, Hillary’s employer bizarrely suspended her without pay for twenty days. Did they want her to knowingly recommend a kid acting like a neo-nazi instead?

We’re hoping this all gets worked out in Hillary’s favour in the very near future and we were happy to make a contribution to the crowdfunding page supporting her, so she doesn’t have to worry about paying rent or her bills or feeding her family because she stood up on principle against a racist little asshat that happens to go to the school she teaches at.

As AFA Den Haag put it “Any successful antifascist movement needs a reliable infrastructure to support it, preferably one as autonomous and far away from the prying eyes of repression as possible.

During the 13 years of its existence the “De Vloek” squat has been a place antifa always could count on to raise much-needed funds, host meetings and mobilization events and a no questions asked space to launch actions from or retreat too if needed.

In other words, De Vloek was a valuable resource for anti-fascists for 13 years. De Vloek always had our backs; it was time to have their backs in return. So we were honoured to be able to contribute to their legal defence fund and we call on all anti-fascists to do the same.

It’s been a busy month here at The International Defence Fund. For one, donations to the Defence Fund spiked noticeably right around the time of the inauguration or a certain political leader. Maybe it was coincidence or maybe it was a huge number of people waking up to an awful political reality and wanted to make sure the people that will be on the front lines have the support and protection they deserve. Hard to say which.

This also meant that the Decisions Crew (who discuss and make all decisions regarding the Defence Fund) doubled in size and we now have well over 300 Decisions Crew members in fifteen different countries working together to call the shots.

Finally, we recently had to discuss and decide on not one, not two, but three requests for help simultaneously! Two were fairly straightforward:

(V., at the opening of his trial last week)

V. is an antifascist and FC Partyzan supporter in Belarus currently on trial for allegedly attacking a group of racist hoodlums in his town. It was a no-brainer for us to send him some money to help pay his legal fees.

(as Michael Dewitz found out, when you show up at a university to seig heil Jewish students and parade around with your felt-marker swastika armband, you’re going to get surrounded by hundreds of angry antifa students for three hours. Then you might need to go shopping for a new jacket, after you get out of the hospital.)

Then there was the matter of two concerned citizens in Gainseville. After hearing that 34-year-old local neo-nazi dipshit Michael Dewitz’s three-hour harassment of Jewish university students was coming to an end, they allegedly relieved Dewitz of his swastika-armband-adorned jacket – possibly out of concern that he would suffer from heat exhaustion, having just been surrounded by hundreds of angry students in the hot Florida sun for three hours. You’d think the two gentlemen would be praised for their quick thinking and concern for Dewitz’s health but no! Instead, the authorities charged them with assault and theft.

In this case, there was a crowdfunding page established to help with the legal fees incurred by these two Good Samaritans but we couldn’t confirm any link to the two individuals and failed to make contact with the crowdfunding organizers. We did, however, get in touch with the defense lawyers for our two Florida friends and so paid a chunk of their legal bills directly.

Finally, the request for help that appeared to be the most cut-and-dry turned out to be the most complicated:

(NEVER LET THEM HAVE THE CAMPUS: antifa confronting Milo @ UW in Seattle in January)

When alt right bigot, misogynist, and transphobe Milo Yiannopoulus spoke at the UW campus in Seattle in January, lots of people on-and-off-campus took issue with his brand of fascist harassment campaigns being provided a platform. In the ensuing confrontation, a well-respected IWW member of the General Defense Committee was shot in the stomach by a radicalized right-wing extremist. Of course, the police believed the extremist’s claim of self-defence and did not investigate or charge him with anything. Meanwhile, our Wobbly friend remains in hospital, after nearly succumbing to his bullet wound.

While this was undeniably wonderful, it left us debating whether he really needed the pittance we could provide him or whether it would be better to save our resources to help other antifa who do not have quite as many generous friends to back them up.

In the end, we donated $100USD – a token amount to be sure, but one that we hope expresses the spirit of support and solidarity we made it in, while allowing us to hold back resources that will probably be needed to help other antifa that are not as fortunate as our Wobbly friend.